Susan M. (Elli) Elliott, Family Empires, Roman and Christian. Vol. 1: Roman Family Empires. Household, Empire, Resistance. Salem, OR, Polebridge Press 2018

The monetary systems of the Han and Roman empires

The Chinese tradition of supplementing large quantities of bronze cash with unminted gold and silver represents a rare exception to the western model of precious-metal coinage. This paper provides a detailed discussion of monetary development in ancient China followed by a brief survey of conditions in the Roman empire. The divergent development of the monetary systems of the Han and Roman empi...

Empires and Empire-Building City-States

Two empires or three?

In the last 100 years, several spectacular discoveries were made in the world of biodiversity, discoveries such as the Okapi in the Congo forest, the only living relative of the giraffes, or Latimeria in the Indian Ocean, a living coelacanth fish, believed to have been extinct for 60 million years. But these were merely small white spots on the world map of biodiversity. By contrast, Carl Woese...

The Roman Empire and the Grain Fleets:

The application of contemporary public sector management concepts and theories allows us to rethink some of our perceptions of the Roman Empire’s rôle as a service provider and the way in which the provision of services was made more efficient. This paper uses the imperial grain supply as a case in point to demonstrate that contracting out allowed the state to take advantage and build on its co...

Doctors and diseases in the Roman Empire

Perhaps the best tribute I am in a position to make to Professor McKeown, who died in June of 1988, is simply to praise this, presumably his final book. I find that easy to do because it is obviously the product of deep reading and years of pondering, but I would like to take one step more. Thomas McKeown was a philosopher and a moralist, as well as a historian, of medicine. In an age when medi...